Didactic experience has taught us that it is insufficient to load students up with a series of literary theory concepts, hoping that their interest in books will be aroused. Arousing the students’ interest for reading in a constantly changing world, the fashion in which they perceive the relationship between books and the internet, between the traditional means of information and documentation and the new technology are questions to which professors try to give the most appropriate answers.
The perception that we have of the digital text is completely different from the one we have on the “physical” text. On the internet, the text seems to be more suitable for short readings rather than for long ones. Hypertext itself (as a new literary genre) is, for the most part, a short text (or a multitude of texts) through which the advantages of the new technology are being exploited (and which are not susceptible of thorough and long analyses). “Traditional” reading means contemplation, means pondering over a certain paragraph, over a certain piece of text and assimilating step by step, in proper rhythm, the profound meaning that lies hidden in the text. It is self-evident that, by contrast, “digital reading” suppresses almost entirely the contemplative aspects of “traditional reading”, and the general direction is almost exclusively horizontal. Therefore, from the classical opposition between the horizontal and the vertical, the former becomes pre-eminent. Concurrently, in the non-digital culture, the disproportion between the two types of reading is not so high. It is obvious that no one is obliged to choose definitively between the two modes of reading, however the print culture medium has borne within a certain equilibrium that we cannot enjoy to the same extent nowadays. Our project proposes an alliance between the book and the internet, encouraging e-reading, and putting together a bibliography for students from age 14 to 16 who study their maternal language and literature and with whom we may communicate in foreign language that have are studied in high-school.
Project timespan: at the beginning 1 year, and later on, depending on the results, it might be extended.